$266 billion is lost on administrative waste annually in the U.S. healthcare system, as reported by the American Medical Association. Headlines like this are staggering, but far from the only challenges faced by the healthcare industry. Beyond this, there are a growing range of issues on the minds of healthcare executives, from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) changes, reimbursement reductions, revenue and margin pressures, labor challenges and continually rising costs, to cyber threats, regulatory compliance and digital transformation – and this is hardly an exhaustive list. Under each category, there are myriad considerations and permutations based upon care setting, patient and payer mix, geographic market and any other number of potential business impacts.
And while priorities are typically centered around financial viability, clinical and technology innovations and cybersecurity – all of which are critical components of a strong, healthy and secure environment – many legacy processes persist that are a drain on staff, drive up operational costs and contribute to the national aggregate waste problem. The operational outcomes of these challenges can result in errors, lost revenue opportunities and even negative patient experience ratings. These include hybrid manual/electronic workflows that must bridge the gap between the digital and analog environments and often include paper and reliance on fax. However, given the weight of other priorities, these workflow challenges are often lost in the mix and permitted to continue.
Konica Minolta, a global technology company with a 150-year history rooted in imaging, print and workflow process improvement, partners with our healthcare customers to develop practical and effective solutions to these persistent paper-driven challenges. With hundreds of large hospitals, and thousands of clinics and extended care customers, we see firsthand how much is still being printed, faxed, scanned and managed. Thus, we work closely with our customers to right-size their print requirements, and implement controls to better track and manage volumes, as well as secure the protected health information (PHI) typically embedded in healthcare print. Furthermore, we look for ways to automate processes that are so often associated with print and inefficient faxing, such as patient intake, referral and order management, credentialing, back office processes and similar tasks.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement and the National Patient Safety Foundation reported that approximately 100 million specialty referral requests are made from ambulatory care providers on an annual basis. And while electronic health records (EHR), Health Information Exchanges and electronic referrals automate a percentage of these exchanges, a significant portion of referrals depend on fax. According to Steven Posnack, Acting Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy (and Acting National Coordinator for Health Information Technology), at least 70 percent of healthcare providers still exchange medical information using fax. Incredibly, more than 9 billion pages are faxed each year, adding an estimated $125 billion in costs across the healthcare system.
National statistics like these can make your head spin, but are less meaningful at the local level, where healthcare providers are more concerned with their own businesses and market dynamics. They take on more meaning, however, when the core challenges expressed in those statistics are experienced within your own community and hospital.
That was the situation at one of Konica Minolta’s customers, a 100-bed hospital in the northeast with a physician group, three urgent care centers, four imaging centers and various affiliated community referrals partners. The facility was looking for ways to improve its collection, processing and distribution of electronic fax documents, with particular emphasis on patient lab orders. The hospital receives hundreds of faxes each month from referral providers. These include lab requisition orders for various diagnostic tests, which require substantial time to capture, review, rename and file the orders in network folders to allow access when the patients arrive for the tests, as well as entering the orders into the EHR. This was a very manual and time-consuming process, resulting in over 300 hours per month spent by staff.
Challenge:
To address this operational bottleneck, Konica Minolta worked closely with the customer and their EHR provider, and ultimately implemented our Dispatcher Phoenix Healthcare solution, which provides document and process automation. In this instance, the solution captures e-faxes received by the customer’s fax server, then applies intelligent document automation processing such as rules-based optical character recognition (OCR) to recognize, extract and match patient meta-data to validate the patient against their electronic health record (EHR) system. Processes are built in to return orders to the referral source when insufficient or invalid data is present, or for new patients without existing accounts. The solution then indexes the lab orders to facilitate retrieval when the patient arrives. Once the patient presents at the lab and the visit is documented in the EHR, Dispatcher Phoenix will release the documents and attach them to the appropriate patient record in the EHR. The system also provides staff with an easy means of searching for the orders, thus expediting the overall process and reducing wait times. In summary, it automates order capture, streamlines patient matching and validation and improves access to the documents for the following outcomes:
The use case and processing challenges in this example describe a situation that is not unusual across healthcare provider organizations of all sizes and care settings. Although there are certainly automation capabilities within various EHRs – as well as other third-party solutions that tackle specific components within these types of workflow processes – there is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and in this case, Dispatcher Phoenix provided an effective solution to their long-standing workflow issues. Because the solution is flexible, the customer is now reviewing other departments and use cases that can leverage the automation to solve similar challenges. These may be related to referral processing, but are not limited to just that, as other processes such as AR/AP, Mailroom, Procurement, RCM and others may benefit as well.
Konica Minolta is proud to work with our healthcare customers to assist in solving problematic manual workflow, reducing costs, improving security and most importantly giving staff back more time to devote to patient-centered care.
